Michael Sarrazin (1940-2011)

Actor, Person 0

Date of Birth: 22 May 1940 (as Jacques Michel André Sarrazin)
Place of Birth: Quebec City, Quebec, Canada
Date of Death: 17 April 2011
Place of Death: Montreal, Quebec, Canada
Main Occupations: actor

Born in 1940 in Quebec, Canada as Jacques Sarrazin, Michael Sarrazin was bought up in Montreal where he started acting in school plays while attending D’Arcy McGee High School. He was, by all accounts, a poor student, moving from one school to the next and only taking an interest in any acting opportunities they offered him. At the age of 17 he left school altogether and, determined that acting was what he wanted to do with his life, worked hard in several small theatrical troupes while eking out a living working in a department store or toiling away as a dishwasher. They were hard times, as he recalled in an interview with Frank Rasky of the Canadian newspaper The Gazette in 1968: “It was tough bumming a mattress and a little cheer from friends,” he said. “Some people called me a jerk, an idiot, for being a tramp actor. But other people believed in me from the outset. They pulled me through.”

In 1964, he moved on to Toronto after borrowing $50 from a friend where he found his first stage roles with the Toronto Workshop Productions repertory troupe run by George Luscombe. He eventually made it to the screen when he appeared opposite Genevieve Bujold in a television adaptation of Romeo and Juliet and he had small roles in a pair of short films made by the National Film Board of Canada. After appearing in the CBC Show of the Week production Between the Silences of Love, Sarrazin was taken on by a New York agent who bagged him a contract at Universal, becoming one of the last actors to benefit from the old studio system. After a few television appearances, Universal cast him in the western Gunfight in Abilene in 1967 opposite singer turned actor Bobby Darin and that same year that cast him alongside George C. Scott in The Flim-Flam Man.

The following year he made The Sweet Ride, appearing with British actress Jacqueline Bisset. Their on-screen chemistry extended off camera and they would be in a relationship for the next 14 years. Hitchcockian psychological thriller Eye of the Cat followed though Sarrazin wasn’t the first choice for the role of main character Wylie. The film was first announced in Variety in January 1968 with the news that Bernard Schwartz of Joseph M. Schenk Enterprises and his London associate Phillip Hazelton were going to produce the film for Universal under the title Wylie. By the first week of February, Terence Stamp had been announced as the star, playing the eponymous Wylie. Unfortunately, what Variety refers to as “conflicting schedules” mean that he had to relinquish the role and Sarrazin stepped in to replace him.

1969 was a big year for Sarrazin – as well as Eye of the Cat, he appeared in In Search of Gregory for director Peter Wood, opposite Julie Christie and John Hurt and he also his breakthrough role, playing Robert in Sydney Pollack’s They Shoot Horses, Don’t They, for which he earned a BAFTA nomination for Most Promising Newcomer to Leading Film Roles. “You could have paid me a dollar a week to work on that film,” he later said. “It hits you bolt upright. I still get really intense when I watch it. We stayed up around the clock for three or four days. Pollack said we should work until we showed signs of exhaustion.” He almost didn’t get the role as he was being considered for the part eventually played by Jon Voight in Midnight Cowboy but Universal refused to lend him out to director John Schlesinger.

Over the next decade Sarrazin’s star continued to rise as he appeared in films like The Reincarnation of Peter Proud (1975), The Groundstar Conspiracy (1972) and the comedy The Gumball Rally and made two films with Paul Newman, Sometimes a Great Notion and The Life and Times of Judge Roy Bean. But he was back in Canada in the 1980s and 90s appearing in home grown films and television of which Ronald Bergan of The Guardian noted “few rose above the mediocre. An exception,” he conceded, “was La Florida (1993), a French-Canadian film produced by his brother Pierre Sarrazin, in which he played a lounge singer called Romeo Laflamme.” Sarrazin died in 2011 at the age of 70.

Genre Filmography

All as actor

Categories: Actor, Person


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